The Path of Least Resistance
by Nightwind
Summary: Movie The events shortly before, during, and just after the Transformers movie, all seen through Barricade's eyes. Watch Nightwind as she attempts to post a story in chronological order as she writes it. Eek!
1. Chapter 1

_**Author's Note:** _

_So, Nightwind's goin' out on a limb here, in two ways: _

_1) Normally, I don't post stories unless they're completely finished and fully edited to my satisfaction. 2) Normally, I don't write stories in chronological order. I write what comes to me as it comes to me; often the very last part of a story that I write is its beginning. _

_But since this story already has something of a built-in plot, I've decided to try posting this one as I write it, which goes against Condition One up there. This also forces me to write the story in chronological order which goes against Condition Two. I consider it an experimental writing exercise. Hopefully, it will be a **successful **experiment for me. We'll see... I can't tell you how often this will be updated, though. It will depend upon how the spirit moves me. I'm __**hoping **for weekly updates, but that might be too ambitious. Nagging me to update might -- or might not -- help.  
_

_The story itself is pretty straightforward: It will detail the events shortly prior to, during, and just after the live-action Transformers movie (a continuity which, for the record, I consider to be completely separate from and different from the original G1 continuity), all told from Barricade's point of view. Why? Because I've become a rabid Barricade fangirl for some reason that I can't entirely explain, and thus I wish to expand and fill in his character to my satisfaction. I need no other reason. :) So...Well, enjoy. :)_

* * *

The small and marginally-intelligent organic creatures who infested in plague-like proportions the poor, innocent planet one orbital position sunward called the planet on which Barricade was strolling "Mars." He had discovered this in the course of diligent intelligence-gathering via what the same organic creatures called "the Internet." He had also discovered that it was the name of an ancient – on a human timescale – deity who in some similarly ancient culture was the patron of war. Either that or the planet was named after a candy company. Barricade highly suspected the former, however. 

But whatever the origin of Mars's name, one thing was certain: The humans who inhabited Earth were utterly fascinated with the place. They had been so, so Barricade had further gleaned from his intelligence-gathering activities, for at least two hundred of their years, and two hundred years was a long time for a race composed of individuals as pathetically short-lived as humanity. But Barricade, for the life of him, could not comprehend the reason for their fascination.

Mars was a planet dead in both the biological and geological senses of the word. It was cold. It was practically atmosphere-less, and it did not have much to offer in the way of gravity, either. Its landscape, if one stooped to call it such, was utterly uninteresting, an unending rock-strewn vista of rusty red iron-oxide dust punctuated here and there with impact craters, deeply eroded rifts and valleys, and the largest extinct volcanoes that Barricade, in all of his extensive galactic peregrinations, had ever seen. Most annoyingly, the planet was regularly plagued with dust storms that seemed to last forever and that, so he and his comrades had quickly and unfortunately discovered, wreaked all sorts of merry havoc with all sorts of Cybertronian systems.

All in all, Barricade could think of literally thousands of planets far more fascinating than Mars could ever hope to be. Yet, the humans had amassed and reported vast amounts of data regarding their neighboring planet, spending inordinate amounts of time and what they called "money" in order to facilitate that data collection. They launched telescopes into the orbit of their own planet so that they could see Mars – among other things – better. Their astronomers wrote dozens of papers about the possibility of life existing on Mars. Some other humans – those given to wild, highly improbable imaginings – envisioned a future in which Mars was subjected to a process that they charmingly termed "terraforming" so that their pathetically delicate fleshy kind could live on Mars without terminating due to asphyxiation and exposure. Lastly, a significant portion of what the humans considered to be classic literature was devoted to the notion of Earth being invaded and in some cases conquered by fearsome aliens from Mars.

The authors of that literature, Barricade reflected with something approaching irony, had _almost_ been right. He and his comrades were indeed aliens who liked to think of themselves as fearsome and who were indeed plotting an invasion of Earth. And that invasion would indeed originate from Mars even if he and his comrades did not actually hail from what the humans called The Red Planet. Yes, irony indeed…

Despite all of the humans' rampant fascination, though, it had only been quite recently that they had started to dispatch more-or-less permanent scientific probes to their neighboring planet. One of those probes Blackout had decided to destroy before cooler heads – like Barricade's own, for instance – had been able to convince him that announcing their presence on Mars in such a blatantly spectacular and attention-getting sort of way was not the brightest of all possible ideas. But then, Blackout was not known for regularly harboring any ideas that could be construed as even moderately dim, much less bright. Since that incident, though, Mars's small group of resident Decepticons had studiously avoided the two rovers that had subsequently taken up residence on Mars while also carefully evading the scrutiny of the various satellite spacecraft that the humans had seen fit to simultaneously inject into Mars's orbit. That the rovers and orbiters had unceremoniously arrived not long after Blackout's impetuous act was, in Barricade's studied opinion, not at all a coincidence.

And so the projected timescale of the Decepticons' plan, such as that plan was, had been somewhat shortened. For several of the humans' years now, Starscream had apparently been content to simply monitor Earth from the relative safety of Mars, on the pretext of gathering information in order to completely ensure the success of their future recovery mission. All the while, he'd been offering up increasingly artful excuses as to why the Decepticons weren't actually _doing_ anything about finding Megatron and the Allspark and were instead sitting there on Mars, ineffectually waiting and watching. For precisely what they were waiting and watching, Barricade was wholly uncertain. He was, however, still 92.7 certain that both Megatron and the Allspark could be found somewhere on or perhaps inside of the planet called Earth, despite the fact that all of his efforts to detect any energy signatures from either of them had ultimately proven fruitless. Still, despite all of Barricade's patient counseling otherwise, Starscream had flatly refused to budge from his stubborn holding pattern.

Barricade knew precisely why Starscream was stalling: Finding Megatron meant that Starscream would no longer be leading the Decepticons, a position that he'd been holding – not to mention greatly enjoying – for thousands of years now, in the wake of Megatron's disappearance and extended absence. Starscream was and always had been loath to give up any sort of power that somehow managed to find its way into his hands, and he was no doubt contemplating how he could plausibly finagle a way to unEarth, so to speak, the Allspark without also being obliged to make a serious effort to unEarth Megatron. For that, he apparently needed time and a great deal of it. Hence, the stalling. Understanding Starscream's motivation for doing nothing, however, did not serve to make their leader's stalling any more tolerable as far as Barricade was concerned.

And now at least _some_ of the humans could hardly fail to be aware that something far beyond their ken was lurking somewhere on their beloved red planet. This had rather undesirably, from Starscream's point of view, given Starscream what the humans would likely call a "kick in the butt." Perhaps Blackout was much smarter than Barricade had given him credit for and just such a Starscream-prod had been Blackout's intended result from the start when he'd decided to destroy the humans' Mars rover…

A semblance of a smirk passed across Barricade's face at the improbable thought; it was far more likely that Blackout had simply succumbed to the frustration associated with a few years of all-encompassing boredom. Still, Blackout's action, the humans' apparent reaction to it, and Barricade's own piecing-together of some tantalizing and obscure bits of human history had all conspired to force Starscream's hand or otherwise risk a mutiny in which he would be greatly outnumbered. As power-hungry as Starscream was, he was also a coward; he greatly valued holding on to life and limb even at the expense of holding on to hard-won personal power.

It was, Starscream had apparently been forced to conclude, time to do something. Even if that "something" was only to ostentatiously send Barricade off on what Starscream no doubt hoped would be a doomed-to-failure mission.

Doomed-to-failure mission or not, Barricade could hardly claim that he would be sorry to leave Mars, his dubious "home" for the last four Martian solar orbits, and leave it he would very shortly, just as soon as he managed to locate Frenzy. He'd had _quite_ enough of the endless painstaking efforts to pick gritty Martian dust and sand out of the myriad crevices of his body, for one thing, and from what he knew of it, Earth at the _very_ least had far less dust than had Mars. A change of locale would, in Barricade's estimation, result in a marked improvement in circumstances and living conditions, and he would be the first Decepticon – but not, alas, the first Cybertronian – ever to arrive on Earth. Other than, in all likelihood, Megatron, of course.

On the other hand, Barricade was to be saddled with the constant presence of Frenzy as a partner for the duration of his covert endeavors on Earth. Given Frenzy's general demeanor, this was something less than an improvement in circumstances and living conditions. But, Barricade supposed, the partner requirement was both tolerable in at least the short term as well as to be expected; he highly doubted that Starscream trusted him or any other of his subordinates well enough to send anyone to Earth by himself.

Idly, as Barricade wandered and scanned the barren, sterile Martian landscape in search of Frenzy's diminutive form, he wondered if he was going on this mission in order to keep an eye on Frenzy or if Frenzy was going on the mission in order to keep an eye on him. In the end, he supposed that it hardly mattered, so long as he escaped from the unending monotony that was life on Mars. In order to accomplish _that_ goal, he'd gladly take along a hundred Frenzys, if need be.

And as that very thought entered Barricade's mind, he spotted the object of his quest just cresting the lip of an impact crater not far away. Barricade picked up his pace, making a beeline for Frenzy before the much smaller Decepticon could disappear on him again. Because as far as Barricade was concerned, the sooner he could leave Mars far, far behind, the better.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Note:** You know, it dawned on me that I should say something about one thing regarding this story. I'm aware that there's a four-part comic movie prequel miniseries lurking around out there somewhere. You, the reader of this story, should know that I have not read said sequel, nor do I have any real intention of ever reading it because, to be perfectly frank, I don't like comic books. I've read the novel prequel and the movie novelization, and that's it._

_But, since I'm doing pre-movie stuff here, I'm going to go out on a limb and wildly guess that what I'm writing might not mesh entirely well with the "official" comic prequel, if you've read it. So…sorry:) Consider this an AU if you're a comic fan and it makes you feel better…_

_Anyway, more of the Great Adventures of Barricade coming right up... But first! I offer my thanks to Wyntir Rose for giving my cute but ultimately unfortunate little Oklahoma Highway Trooper a name. I so suck at names…_

* * *

**  
Thursday, December 14****th****, 2006, 2:17AM**

The northeastern corner of Oklahoma was almost unbelievably flat on top of being largely unpopulated. It was, in fact, one of the few undisturbed stretches of tallgrass prairie that still existed in the United States, a fact that signs scattered along the highway loved to point out _ad nauseum_. Most of the area was ranchland; the cattle population greatly outnumbered the human population.

In short, the area hadn't changed much in a century. Or more.

The area was also, in the not-so-humble opinion of one Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper named Michael Richmond, deadly dull. Hardly anything ever happened, it seemed, in his assigned patrol area, which made for long overnight shifts of complete and unremitting boredom. At the moment, he was sitting in his cruiser at the intersection of Highway 60 and one of the many small, unpaved county roads that criss-crossed the highway at odd intervals. He was hoping and praying that someone would go zooming by him at some exorbitant speed, thus relieving his boredom for just a little while.

It was, he knew, a faint hope. At best.

During the summer, Bluestem Lake, just a quarter mile behind him up the dirt road, drew many weekend campers from the Tulsa area, folks seeking a small rural respite from their hectic urban and suburban lives. More people in the area meant more things going on from a police point-of-view, of course…but camping wasn't exactly a popular pastime in December. Way too cold. Occasionally at this time of year someone would drink themselves blind, go speeding down Highway 60, and then wrap themselves around a telephone pole. Other than routine traffic stops, that was about the extent of the "action" that happened in the good ol' Pawhuska area in the middle of the night in December. And even _that_ sort of thing didn't happen all that often.

So, Richmond was definitely looking forward to his reassignment to Tulsa come the new year. Two years of Pawhuska patrol went, in his opinion, way above and beyond the call of duty. Besides, _much_ more interesting things more regularly happened in Tulsa than here in a sleepy little county mostly taken up by a huge and largely-unpopulated Osage Indian reservation. He considered his reassignment a reward for enduring two years of mostly-boredom; he didn't want to know what his offense had been that had earned him that two years of boredom.

Still, there _were_ consolations, certain aspects of his designated patrol area that Richmond didn't really mind at all. It was certainly not stressful, for one thing; unlike many of his comrades, he'd never been in serious mortal danger during his time spent patrolling the Pawhuska area. And then…Oh, then there was his cruiser, one of the two-dozen-or-so special-edition Mustangs that the state had recently purchased. Since his patrol area was entirely rural – basically open prairie – Richmond was occasionally obliged to engage in very high-speed highway chases. So, just a few weeks ago, he had taken possession of one of the new cruisers, and since then he'd even twice or thrice had the opportunity to stretch its proverbial legs on a couple of chases. The car was a _definite_ plus, the epitome of a sweet ride…and Richmond didn't at all look forward to having to relinquish it to his successor in a few weeks' time. In fact, for the cruiser alone, he envied his replacement, some newbie kid, so he'd heard, fresh out of the Academy.

_Figures_, he thought sourly and not for the first time. He'd been with the OHP for almost twenty years before he'd gotten the Mustang and then only six weeks after receiving it, he'd have to give it up. This new kid got one right away…Ah, the cruiser gods did not smile on Michael Richmond, no siree….

But besides even the cruiser, for all of the area's inherent boredom otherwise, out here in the middle of nowhere the air was at least clear and unpolluted. The stars sparkled, like scattered diamonds in the sky, their brilliance unimpeded by overwhelmingly-bright city lights. And tonight…Well, tonight he was being treated to a meteor shower and a fairly spectacular one at that. The Leonids back in August had been somewhat unspectacular as far as he was concerned, but now the Geminids were more than making up for it. Falling stars streaked here and there across the clear, cloudless sky more or less every minute or so, and sometimes there were many of them in the sky at the same time. Richmond had always been something of a closet space geek, a secret that he vigilantly concealed from his more macho comrades, and in the absence of anything else to keep an eye on, he was enjoying the show immensely. Nature's fireworks, they were. He would miss things like this, indeed, once he was stationed in the big city…

He was leaning back in the cruiser's driver seat, contemplating the differences between rural patrol and urban patrol when he saw something strange. It was, he knew, just another meteor…but something about it caught his attention. He wasn't sure what the "something" was, but he noticed the meteor almost at the very moment that it entered Earth's atmosphere. It shone like a beacon up there, flaring a brilliant, angry orange against the blackness of the night sky where the rest of the meteors glowed with an almost serene and far less intense blue-white light. A long tail of flame trailed along behind it, making it look almost more like a comet than a meteor. It had to have been much bigger, Richmond idly reflected as he watched the object fall, than all of the other meteorites he had seen so far.

_Much, _much_ bigger, _Richmond amended just moments later, as the meteor continued to fall lower and lower into Earth's atmosphere. The central mass appeared to grow larger as it descended instead of smaller; it didn't appear to be burning away any of its mass at all as it descended. Short moments later, Richmond mused that it seemed to be heading directly towards him, although he figured that it was only a strange optical illusion of some sort. The odds against the thing _really_ heading straight for him were astronomical, after all...

Only seconds after that thought crossed his mind, though, Richmond fully accepted as fact the preposterous notion that: A) the meteor was indeed heading straight for him, B) it was still flaming malevolently, and C) there was now a faint roar that was half rumble and half whine echoing through the air around him. The racket was growing louder by the millisecond, and it could only have been emanating from the oncoming hunk of space rock. It sounded oddly like the roar of an approaching and unimaginably large freight train engine.

Alarmed, adrenaline suddenly pumping full-force into his system, Richmond threw the cruiser into gear and peeled out for the highway. He turned east, toward town, and fled the immediate area for thirty seconds or so before abruptly slowing and turning the cruiser around, hardly noticing that its tires squealed in protest and that its entire frame slewed dangerously as he executed the sharp, high speed one-eighty. From his new vantage point, Richmond had an excellent view of what happened next.

He watched as the meteor barreled toward the exact spot where he had been sitting just moments ago, realizing with a sort of hollow awe that if he'd stayed in that spot he and his cruiser would have been charred to cinders; the thing had to have passed fifty feet, _tops_, above where he'd been sitting, and it was still flaming, albeit a bit less intensely since it had cooled somewhat since initial reentry. It was still flaming enough, however, to light up the entire surrounding area and to leave motes of flickering flame in its wake that fed on the dried grass, threatening to grow into a raging inferno. As it was, the thing was still uncomfortably close, almost close enough that Richmond could feel the lingering heat of its atmospheric reentry through the cruiser's slightly open window.

It was, in fact, close enough that Richmond noticed that the meteor looked…weird. Granted, he'd never seen such a large one so up close and personal, but still this one didn't look anything like what he imagined a large meteor would look like. It didn't look like a rock at all, for one thing. It looked, instead, almost like some kind of roughly egg-shaped _machine_, a shape too precise to be natural. Its surface was a patchwork of evenly-sized and evenly-spaced – and therefore wholly unnatural – plates. Had he been required to guess, Richmond would have supposed that the thing was metal, not rock. He didn't want to think about the implications of that, though. Knowing his luck, he'd now be tied up in government debriefings for the next few months, if he really was witnessing one of their little secret pet projects…

Richmond watched as the thing, whatever it was, smashed relentlessly through a section of the sparse copse of trees that surrounded the lake. Since it had been abnormally dry in the area lately, the trees, like the grass, almost immediately ignited into leaping flames. The impact with the trees had slowed the thing down a bit…but not by very much. Half a second later, it plowed into the frozen surface of Bluestem Lake, smashing easily through the veneer of ice that covered it. A wall of water and instantly-sublimated steam rose around the impact point, visible in the light generated by the fires behind it, and then the thing – whatever it had really been – sank out of sight. The lake, Richmond knew, was at least thirty feet deep at the impact point; given that and the thing's apparent size, it would take some doing to fish whatever was left of it, whatever it had been, out of the lake.

Richmond sat there for a moment, dumbfounded. Then, hastily radioing for back-up and for the fire department to control what might soon be a large brush fire, he crammed the cruiser into gear again and retraced his path to the lake. Lights flashing and sirens wailing this time, he again approached the county road where he had previously been sitting. He noticed that the immediate area was, indeed, charred. The tall dried grass along the meteor-thing's incoming trajectory had ignited, and it was burning fitfully here and there. The incipient brush fire was noticeably gaining strength even as he drove heedlessly by, fixated on his target.

_So much, _he thought as he approached the lake, _for nothing ever happening here…_

* * *

_  
Earth_, Barricade moodily reflected as he hauled himself out of the icy depths of Bluestem Lake, _has far too much water on it._

He hadn't intended to land in the lake. In fact, he hadn't intended to land in this general area at all; he was well aware that his quarry was somewhere in California, not Oklahoma. But reentry is a tricky thing; one little miscalculation, one little random, unforeseen impact with a meteorite, and you end up hundreds of miles from where you intended to be.

_Perhaps_, Barricade reflected, _calculatedly arriving on Earth under the cover of one of its periodic meteor showers wasn't the most brilliant idea after all, given the "traffic hazards"… _Still, it could have been worse; had the incidental impacts with meteoroids skewed his trajectory in the other direction, he _could_ have found himself at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans rather than at the bottom of a much-shallower freshwater lake.

Thus, Barricade found himself, so his navigational systems told him, in the area that the humans had named Oklahoma. He was in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma, to be exact. To be even more exact, he was in the middle of the deepest part of a cold lake in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma.

It was not, he thought, an ideal way to begin his mission.

As Barricade finally freed himself from the embrace of the lake, water pouring off of his body in small, squishing floods, _finally_ sluicing away the last bits of monumentally irritating Martian grit that remained wedged in his armor joints and systems, Barricade took the opportunity to look around himself, taking stock of his situation.

His scanners detected nothing in the immediate area except the half-frozen lake into which he had unceremoniously crashed. The landscape was flat, mostly empty, and distressingly, messily, organic. He'd known that the latter would be true, but it was still rather a shock to the system to experience it first-hand. A thin strand of trees followed the outside contours of the lake into which he had crashed, but beyond the trees there was just flat grassland. Except for the light generated by flames dancing around in the trees – ignited, he supposed, when he had smashed through them – It was utterly dark. He could detect no human habitations of any size or sort in the immediate vicinity. Which was a blessing.

Or, perhaps, it was a curse. He was still in his protoform. On Earth, this would not do. He knew that there was some unknown number of humans who were well aware of the existence of his kind; he was not sanguine about the prospect of having to deal with them on top of trying to complete his mission successfully. No, at the moment he was far too conspicuous. He needed to do something about that. Quickly.

As if on cue, Barricade detected a faint, distant, but steadily-approaching sound, one that, upon drawing on his pre-mission research, he recognized as the alert siren of a human emergency vehicle of some sort. In the middle of nowhere he very well might be, but his arrival had nevertheless been noticed and was, apparently, to be investigated. It wasn't surprising; the humans, he had learned, were inherently curious creatures with a knack for suddenly showing up in places they had no business being. But this, Barricade reflected, was a good thing, at least for him in this one isolated case. He turned toward the direction from which the ever-louder siren was approaching and simply waited there on the shore of the lake. The last remaining waves generated by his violent plunge into and subsequent emergence from the lake lapped over his feet as he stood there. He paid it no mind.

Barricade didn't have to wait long. He heard the rumble of what was for Earth a high-powered engine before he could see anything of the vehicle itself. He saw the bright, flashing, red and blue lights mounted on its roof and within its front grill even before he could clearly delineate the sleek outlines of the mostly-black vehicle itself. Barricade simply stood there, his head cocked almost curiously to one side, his arms folded calmly across his chest, waiting patiently as the small human vehicle warily approached his position. And then he decided to speed up the process a bit by meeting the vehicle half way, his feet making sucking noises as he pulled them over and over again out of the cloying mud on the shore of the lake. If neither altered course, they would meet, Barricade saw in the dim light cast from the growing fires behind him, in a large, open, but paved area.

A parking lot, Barricade's database of Earth information carefully gathered during his years on Mars, helpfully informed him out of nowhere.

When Barricade and the human vehicle were no more than thirty feet apart in the parking lot, the human vehicle stopped abruptly, its driver, Barricade surmised, losing its nerve once it got a good look at him. After a few seconds, the siren whined down to silence, but the red and blue lights continued to flash on and off, alternating colors that danced off of the matte grey finish of Barricade's much-larger protoform body. Nothing happened for long moments, so Barricade took the opportunity to size up the vehicle in front of him, accessing information about the type of vehicle that it was and about the word "Police," which was emblazoned on both of its two white doors. The results amused him greatly.

_Law enforcement, indeed…_

This amused his so greatly, in fact, that Barricade chuckled as he surveyed the vehicle in front of him and pondered its implications as an alternate form.

_This will do_, he thought as he circled the police cruiser, giving it a wide berth but not wide enough that he couldn't easily note and scan its details. _This will do nicely…_

Barricade's thoughts were interrupted when one of the vehicle's white doors suddenly opened, and its black-uniformed driver stepped brazenly out. Barricade had never seen a human in person before. His kind had encountered humans once before, of course – indeed, it had been that very encounter that had led the Decepticons to believe that the humans' planet harbored both Megatron and the Allspark – but he had never actually seen one. He had researched humans thoroughly, though, since there hadn't been much else to do on Mars. He could speak most of their languages, he understood their various regional cultures, and he knew that they were marginally intelligent on the Cybertronian scale of reckoning such things. He knew, too, that they were stubborn and arrogant, thinking themselves the center of the universe. But for all of his research, Barricade was still struck by how odd and pathetic an individual human was in person. It was small and covered in layers of weak, vulnerable flesh that would be so very easy to rend into unrecognizable tatters…

This one, at least, made an effort to be brave, however. Although it cowered behind its vehicle's door for cover, it clutched in its hands a piece of metal that Barricade realized was a weapon. It was pointed up and directly at his head, but this did not alarm him at all. Instead, curious, he scanned the weapon. Not unexpectedly, it was a primitive weapon; It fired small pieces of metal propelled by the force of a contained chemical explosion. It could not possibly do him any harm even in his somewhat weaker protoform. Pathetic, indeed… Commendably, though, the human kept the weapon aimed steadily up at Barricade's head. Its hands did not shake. It was uncertain and afraid, Barricade knew from idly scanning its bodily functions, but it was holding its ground. And then suddenly, the thing spoke to him.

"Hold it right there!" it loudly demanded.

Demanded! Of him! Barricade's amusement with the situation grew significantly. He had thought to merely crush the human, scan its vehicle in order to use its likeness as his own alternate form for the duration of his time on Earth, and then be gone. But now…?

Well, now the human in its pathetic bravery had earned itself a few more moments of life. Barricade could hear other sirens in the distance – No doubt, the human before him had called for back-up as it had approached Barricade's crash site – but he estimated that he still had a few minutes or so before that back-up would arrive. In the meantime, a sort of scientific curiosity had Barricade in its grip, as it often did.

So, it was time, he decided, for a little bit of fun messing with primitive minds.

Barricade did as the human had requested, deliberately halting his slow pacing toward the police cruiser. He stood there, arms hanging non-threateningly at his sides, just watching the human, waiting to see what it would do next. This, apparently, surprised the creature. No doubt, it had likely expected more of a fight.

"What…What _are_ you?" was the human's next question. Whether it stammered out of fear or confusion Barricade couldn't determine.

Regardless, Barricade resumed his slow approach toward the human. This had the effect of alarming it. It fired its weapon twice. Three times. The small projectiles plinked ineffectually off of Barricade's armor, not slowing him down in the slightest; he hardly felt the tiny impacts at all. He just kept striding relentlessly toward the human. This had the effect of making the human gape, freezing it in place. Its lower jaw dropped in an expression of what Barricade could only assume was shock. Barricade, still highly amused, paced toward it until he was no more than two steps away, staring down at the puny wad of weak flesh below, red optics flaring in the dimness.

"I," he intoned, "am a Martian, and I'm here to conquer your planet." It wasn't really all that far from the truth, and that amused Barricade even more…

Now that he was close enough to the creature, Barricade could see the minute facial expressions that crossed its face in response to his words. He saw its eyes, white globs of goo, widen, saw a muscle in its cheek twitch, saw the tip of a pink tongue involuntarily poke out of the thing's mouth and swipe nervously at its upper lip with its overhanging fur of mustache...

And then, as much "fun" as this was, the sirens were getting closer and Barricade knew that he needed to leave. It wasn't that he feared the arrival of more humans, of course. They could not hurt him, he knew. It was more that the success of his mission – and he was determined that it _would_ succeed, if only to annoy Starscream – rather depended on him staying incognito for the time being. It was best not to cross paths with the humans who were aware of his kind's existence until the time was right to confront them. So, with almost genuine reluctance, Barricade refocused his attention on the still-dumbfounded human law enforcement official below and in front of him.

"It is quite a pity for you, human," he said with mock regret, "that you are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The humans, Barricade discovered, were eminently fragile creatures. He'd known this already, in an abstract way, from the information that he had gathered about them prior to his arrival on Earth. Flesh and bone could never be as strong as metal armor overlying metal base construction. Abstract knowledge was one thing; actually witnessing the result of a mere mild swat, like waving aside an annoying insect, was quite another. The human splattered rather messily against the side of a nearby outbuilding, and this cemented in Barricade's mind the fact that the humans were no threat to him or to any of his fellow Decepticons. At all.

Barricade sneered distastefully at the broken lump of flesh, blood, and bone that had been an Oklahoma Highway Trooper before turning away and focusing his attention on the erstwhile trooper's cruiser. It still sat with the engine rumbling in idle, lights flashing, and one white door ajar. Nodding in satisfaction, Barricade scanned the vehicle and assimilated the resulting information. Moments later, just as the other human vehicles were nearing the entrance of the parking lot, Barricade transformed and headed for the county road that would lead him to the highway. He passed the other vehicles heading toward the lake – more police vehicles vaguely similar to the one that he emulated and a large truck that he knew was used to extinguish fires – but they paid him no mind as he headed toward the highway.

Now, he had only to find his partner…and then his quarry.


	3. Chapter 3

_LOL! I can has update! LOL!_

_(ahem) Er, sorry… Anyway, finally updating here. Apologies for the big delay. My brain was completely eaten by art, such as my "art" is. But over the last couple of days, the art muse has become more willing to share brainspace with the writing muse, so I've been poking at this while eating lunch at work._

_Also? I have to say that writing sequentially totally sucks. I have all these ideas for later on in this story, BUT I HAVE TO GET THERE FIRST! ARRRRGH! Brain no like thinking linearly._

_But anyway…This chapter introduces Frenzy, who I have discovered does not come easily to me. At all. Which means that I will probably write him badly all the way through this, so my apologies in advance. But hey, at least I came up with an explanation as to why he's so spastic. I felt compelled to do this because this story is kinda-sorta-maybe in the novels-to-movie continuum, and in the prequel novel Frenzy isn't nearly so spazzy as he is portrayed in the movie. In fact, he acts and speaks about as normally as any Decepticon can get. (Granted, he's portrayed not-spazzy in the movie novelization, too, but…HUSH:) ) So, I felt that providing a reason for that sort of drastic behavioral change was necessary… In the novels, Frenzy's also __not described as a symbiote, like Scorponok is, so I am forced to conclude that he is actually his own man, so to speak, not really dependent on Barricade for anything. So, that's how I write him and see him. With that, off we go…_

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**Sunday, December 17****th****, 2006, 7:17 PM  
**US Highway 250, near Bartow, West Virginia

Prior to his arrival on Earth, Barricade had performed what he had thought was an impressively thorough degree of research about the planet, at least in terms of the continent that he knew was he going to be inhabiting for however long his mission lasted. In the three days that had passed since his unceremonious and unplanned arrival in Oklahoma, he'd been continuing his research, monitoring television, radio, and police channels as well as the Internet, gleaning and filing away whatever information he could from those sources, regardless of whether or not he thought the information would ultimately be at all useful to him.

There was one aspect of Earth, though, that had somehow managed to escape his scrutiny. In retrospect, Barricade couldn't imagine how he'd missed it, but missed it he had. Perhaps it was just that he had thought it to be insignificant, and so he had decided to ignore gathering data about this one little aspect of life on Earth. If that was the case…Well, if that was the case then at the moment, Barricade was regretting that decision. _Mightily_ regretting it.

Earth had an atmosphere. Atmosphere meant weather. Barricade was well aware of that general fact, of course, but he hadn't thought too much about it. He had figured that whatever Earth threw at him, it could not _possibly_ be worse than Mars's continual and seemingly-eternal dust storms.

He'd been wrong. Dead wrong. Where Mars had dust storms, Earth had charming little things known as blizzards. The dust storms, while monumentally annoying, were in the end mere nuisances. Blizzards, though…Blizzards, Barricade was quickly and unwelcomingly discovering, could be downright dangerous, even to one such as himself.

Part of the problem was the vehicular disguise he had chosen for himself. It had its advantages, certainly. All he had to do to coerce humans to move out of his way, for instance, was to flash the lights and squawk the siren, after which they scattered like the sheep they were. Even when he was at rest, the humans tended to give him a blessedly wide berth, sometimes rushing by him while casting what they thought were furtive glances in his direction. When he'd been initially observing the behavior, Barricade had harbored the ridiculous suspicion that they had somehow pegged him as an alien amongst them, that perhaps certain humans had some sort of unusual perceptual abilities that allowed them to see him for what he really was. Further contemplation and observation, though, bore out his subsequent hypothesis that some humans were simply afraid of the police. No doubt, these particular humans had as much to hide as Barricade himself had; they were just _far_ less competent at disguising this fact than he was.

So, Barricade's chosen alternate form had the unexpected benefit of keeping humans away from him and out of his way, which had allowed him to traverse the fifteen hundred or so miles between northeastern Oklahoma and eastern West Virginia in a little less than the twelve hours that had elapsed since he'd figured out where Frenzy was. He'd managed that feat by piecing together various news reports and then factoring in the babbled online ravings of an Appalachian conspiracy theorist who had apparently _seen_ Frenzy, given that on the creature's webpage he had recounted a remarkably accurate description of Barricade's diminutive partner. No sane human gave his ravings any credence whatsoever, of course…or so Barricade hoped, anyway. In the back of his mind was the knowledge that Sector 7, the government organization of humans who were aware of his kind's existence, was headquartered in Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C and uncomfortably close to where Frenzy had made Earthfall. That knowledge had propelled Barricade at all possible speed toward West Virginia to collect his wayward partner before someone else could manage to do so.

Barricade had no idea how Frenzy had ended up in West Virginia, given that his target, like Barricade's, had been California. He could only assume that Frenzy had encountered a meteor, just as he had, only the resulting disruption of Frenzy's course had been far worse than Barricade's had been. However his partner had ended up three thousand miles from where he was supposed to be, though, the very_last_ thing Barricade needed was to have to stage a rescue operation before proceeding with his real mission. The stark fact was that he _needed_ Frenzy in order to accomplish his mission successfully.

Now that Barricade was within approximately twenty miles of Frenzy's location, he knew precisely where his partner was; his locator signal shone brightly, like a beacon, on Barricade's sensors. He'd tried to communicate with the other Decepticon, even, although Frenzy hadn't seen fit to answer him. The problem, of course, was getting to him. And in trying to do that, Barricade had run full-speed-ahead into the single disadvantage – so far, at least – of his new alternate form.

The special-edition Mustang, Barricade was forced to conclude, was not designed for driving in snow. Its meager amount of ground clearance did not mesh well with the fact that the snow was falling and piling up and quickly refreezing into a deeply-rutted, inches-thick layer of sheer ice. The Mustang's overpowered engine and the fact that it was propelled by its rear wheels did not allow for much in the way of traction on slippery, snow-and-ice-encrusted roads. Barricade's own inexperience at navigating in such conditions had caused him to make critical mistakes that, twice now, had sent him spinning and careening off the side of the road. After one of those helpless, out-of-control slides, he'd had to resort to hastily transforming and then clinging to a large tree in order to prevent himself from hurtling off of a rather steep precipice. Luckily for Barricade, no one had been around to see this happen, for which he was thankful mostly because the predicament had been monumentally _embarrassing_while it had lasted.

So now Barricade was reduced to creeping along at a ridiculously slow pace. He'd learned through almost-painful experience to carefully downshift instead of brake in order to slow himself down when necessary and afterwards to only _very_ carefully accelerate, ever mindful of the excessive amount of horsepower caged and straining under his hood. At this rate, he'd traverse the twenty miles that lay between him and Frenzy in approximately six days.

Assuming, of course, that the roads didn't eventually become completely impassable before then. Barricade was trying to balance his growing sense of urgency against the realities of the weather, moving as quickly as possible under the circumstances, but he knew that he wasn't succeeding very well. The weather, he knew, was going to defeat him if it didn't miraculously moderate in the _very_ near future. He simply couldn't move fast enough to outrun the steadily-accumulating blanket of icy snow on the road. He supposed that if all else failed he could transform and walk…but given the fact that the immediate area was already fired up with conspiracy theories and wild stories about deranged government-experiment robots rampaging through the local state forest that Frenzy currently inhabited – stories which were sure to reach the ears of Sector 7 if they hadn't already done so – he'd use that as only a _very_ last resort. In the meantime, he would simply keep advancing on his four wheels, hoping that that would be enough...

Three hours later, after several…interesting…adventures, one of which involved sliding backwards down a long and fairly steep hill, Barricade arrived at Frenzy's general location. He came to a slow, careful halt and took stock of the situation. His sensors told him that the road upon which he was sitting – a small state forest access road, the condition of which was far more treacherous than the highway had been – rimmed a rather steep ravine that likely would have been quite picturesque if it wasn't ten-o-clock at night in the middle of a snowstorm. As it was, Barricade could see nothing on the normal visual spectrum, given the combination of near-winter-solstice darkness, the lack of moonlight, and the disorienting effects of the now-gently-falling snow, but Frenzy's signal was still eminently clear. He was down in the ravine. Barricade could pinpoint his exact location, even. Again, the problem was simply getting to him; Barricade was not particularly sanguine about the prospect of transforming and tromping blindly down into a steep ravine. Perhaps he could convince Frenzy to come to him instead…

"Frenzy," Barricade hissed over his comm after opening up the appropriate frequency. When no one answered, be added, "Frenzy, this Is Barricade. Respond."

The other end of the communication crackled abruptly to life. There was static, random white noise – unusual, given that only a few hundred meters separated the two Decepticons – and then a voice that was recognizably Frenzy's said…something. For the life of him, Barricade did not understand a word that his partner uttered, however.

"I…didn't quite get that," Barricade replied uncertainly after a moment of bewilderment. "Repeat."

Another stream of gibberish, louder and far more urgent this time, erupted over the comm frequency, except that this time two words were recognizable, at the very end of the stream.

The words were, "Need help."

Barricade sighed. He'd almost figured as much. So much for Frenzy coming up to the access road, then. To Frenzy he ordered simply, resignedly, "Stay where you are. I'm coming down."

Which, of course, was much easier said than done. Barricade transformed, leaving his headlights on just for the principle of the thing, and began to clamber down the steep incline that was the wall of the ravine. Not even a quarter of the way down, he lost his footing and ended up sliding, out of control, the rest of the way. He smashed through stands of bare winter trees and ricocheted off boulders concealed by a thin layer of camouflaging snow. Down he slid, accelerating all the while, until finally he reached the bottom of the ravine…which, of course, had been carved over millennia by the rapidly-running but relatively shallow river in which he eventually landed, somehow face-first.

Raising his head from the frigid water, Barricade spat water our of his mouth and, completely heedless of the possibility that he might be heard, he immediately launched into a loud stream of the vilest Cybertronian curses and insults he knew, creatively denouncing Earth, its weather, and its water for all he was worth. When he had run through his entire repertoire of curses and insults and had subsequently descended into an irritated silence, he found that he somehow felt better. And so, he was able to return his focus to the job at hand.

Rising to his feet, pulling himself out of the river, he consulted his scanners again, only to find that Frenzy was now above him and off to his right. Sighing, Barricade trudged off, taking advantage of the relatively flat and easily-navigable riverbank terrain until he had to divert and climb up to the spot where Frenzy sat, waiting for him as ordered. Thankfully, Barricade accomplished the climb without any undue problems.

He found that Frenzy had taken shelter on the lee side of a large, recently-downed tree. He huddled there miserably, although he seemed unable to sit entirely still. If his body wasn't actually moving, shifting slightly to the left or to the right, at least one of his appendages was twitching, if not outrightly jerking. Frenzy stared blankly at Barricade for a moment, as if he had no idea who or what Barricade was. He continued to stare until Barricade went down on his knees in front of him, in order to get a better look at the infiltrator.

"B-b-b-b-Barricade!" Frenzy stuttered then, his entire body jerking as if Barricade's arrival had roused him all unexpectedly from some sort of oblivious stupor. Frenzy said many other things as well, and at a dizzying speed, but only about one word out of ten was intelligible. From them, though, Barricade could gather that he was being berated for his stupid plan to arrive on Earth during a meteor shower. The last bit of Frenzy's apparent tirade, though, ended with the tone of his voice rising, and then Frenzy regarded Barricade expectantly. He'd asked a question, obviously.

"I have no idea what you're trying to say, Frenzy," Barricade told Frenzy. "Try to sit still for a moment," he added as he initiated a scan of his small partner, trying to find whatever damage it was that was scrambling his words and, apparently, his motor pathways. Barricade had a sinking suspicion that he'd be able to do nothing about whatever damage he found; he was no medic. But…at least it would be nice to know what was wrong.

The smaller Decepticon had obviously suffered far worse effects from his collision with a meteor than Barricade had in his. Barricade's detailed scan detected everything from superficial armor dents to damaged deep circuit pathways, no doubt the cause of Frenzy's inability to sit still for more than thirty seconds. His vocal processor was damaged as well, no doubt the cause of his inability to speak in any coherent way.

Tersely, Barricade relayed his findings to his diminutive partner, mercilessly adding that there was nothing that he could do to repair the damage that was causing Frenzy's…disabilities. He would require a qualified medic or, at the very least, a good long stretch of time to heal. Unfortunately, time was not a commodity of which they had much to spare.

"You will just have to wait for your repair systems to take care of the damage," Barricade finished. _If they can_…he silently added. Barricade had his doubts about that.

Frenzy, meanwhile, nodded jerkily, stood up unsteadily, and then proceeded to bounce nervously from one foot to the other.

"Can you complete our mission?" Barricade asked as he rose to his own feet and as he watched the other Decepticon shift restlessly, back and forth, back and forth. It was, of course, the uppermost question in his mind.

Frenzy stilled for a second or two, apparently considering Barricade's question. After a few seconds of contemplation, he looked up at the much-taller Decepticon, his head twitching randomly on his thin neck. Then he answered solemnly, "Can. M-m-m-must regenerate more and recharge first. But c-c-c-can."

And then Frenzy's relative stillness was abruptly ripped apart by a round of frenetic movement. It could almost be considered dancing, in fact.

"Hear the music! Hear the music!" Frenzy bizarrely crowed as he "danced," before his words devolved into gibberish again. There was a definite rhythm to the gibberish, though, and almost a melody as well. In fact, it was almost as if Frenzy was singing...

Watching him for a few flabbergasted moments, Barricade had serious doubts about Frenzy's apparent certainty that he could accomplish his part of the mission. And after a few more moments spent watching Frenzy in bewildered and uncomprehending exasperation, Barricade had had enough.

"Frenzy!" he bellowed, his deep voice ricocheting off the walls of the ravine. "Stop!"

Frenzy froze in mid-"dance," one leg raised slightly to the side and one arm lifted above his head. He regarded Barricade dully, as if he'd forgotten that the other Decepticon was there. In fact, it wouldn't have surprised Barricade in the least if he _had_ been forgotten. Frenzy, after all, had seemed completely lost in his own little world.

"Hear the music?" Frenzy asked brightly, innocently of Barricade.

"No!" Barricade shot back, irritated. "I don't hear the music. And in case you are not aware of the fact, we are currently on the wrong side of the continent," Barricade tersely added. "We do not have_time_ for this. We need to get out of here."

Chastened, disappointed, but nodding jerkily, Frenzy began to head unsteadily off, toward the bottom of the ravine, until Barricade made a wordless noise that stopped the little infiltrator in his tracks. Frenzy glanced uncertainly up and over his shoulder at Barricade, who gestured pointedly up the wall of the ravine.

"That way," he said.

Frenzy blinked at the dark, steep incline of the ravine wall and unleashed a stream of indignant gibberish at it. But then, that done, he staggered toward it willingly enough, without argument.

Barricade, for his part, was thankful for small favors.

As it turned out, Frenzy, for all of his lack of coordination at the moment, was able to easily clamber monkey-like, on all fours, up the wall of the ravine. He was, in fact, far more adept than Barricade was at the task, which was vastly annoying to the scout. His irritation was only slightly mitigated by the fact that the clouds had begun to clear and thin wisps of moonlight filtered through them and reflected off the ice-glazed surface of the snow, helping him to more easily find footing this time. So, in a relatively short period of time, both Decepticons reached the access road.

Wordlessly, Barricade transformed and opened his passenger-side door. Frenzy, equally silently, hopped in. Once inside, though, his silence disappeared.

"Road trip! Road trip! Road trip!" Frenzy began to hoot over and over again while spasmodically bouncing around in Barricade's back seat, thus occasionally whacking his already-damaged head on the roof with a rather alarming amount of force. It didn't seem to faze him in the least, though, for he simply kept bouncing, still dancing to some strange tune that only he could hear. Shortly thereafter, the "singing" started again.

Barricade heaved a long internal sigh as he fired up the Mustang's engine and then three-point-turned across the narrow width of the treacherous, snow-covered road.

It was, he wearily reflected, going to be a _very_ long three thousand miles…


End file.
